Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
On Taking Slobs Seriously apologists see it, this contemporary Dillinger's world view is just as legiti-mate as that of any other citizen. Indeed it is often portrayed as no different than One...
...themselves as a result of not being im- It may not be much consolation, but it is mune to the bacteria and suchlike of something, and it should help us pre-Earth...
...Both bore- dom and spiritual anarchy can be power ful engines for catastrophe --especially amongst people who gorge their enthusiasms...
...But now Americans have loosed an egalitarian fever throughout the land, and they are all running around evangel- King the palpably untrue proposition that ~he carcass of the meanest man, woman, )r child is very special stuff...
...In the long view, though it entertains me vastly, I can see very little good coming from this passion for taking everyone so seriously...
...So this mania for taking people seri- ously has its tragic issue, but let us not forget that it also conduces to some gorgeous moments...
...I can see little good in it, be- cause a nation zealously pursuing vulgar notions drifts toward the brutal...
...Indeed this pandemic condition of restrained self-esteem reached even into Lhe White House...
...nothing is certain...
...It ~fflicts the hominids of both sexes, all ~ge groups, every walk of life, and every state in the Union...
...Pure, high-grade bosh...
...The result of all of this tomfoolery is that today many trashy oafs are writing poetry when they could more profitably be shoveling dung...
...Instead we hear a few incomprehen- sible grunts from the "accused," while a mob of apologists rushes out to proclaim the rascal's superior virtue and suffering circumstance...
...Even more absurdly, they insist that everyone has ~is own exquisitely beautiful identity...
...Girls thought him a screwball...
...come to an end...
...His boss fired him for breaking paper plates...
...He was misunderstood and ignored...
...Thus far, bril-House and a Pulitzer Prize from liant defense lawyers, invocations of ex- Columbia University...
...So be sure to get your change of address in now...
...Rather, the serious problem reposes in the certainty that when a nation's citizens take themselves seri-ously, the nation takes itself seriously...
...And to this extent, it is true that ization seems doomed...
...It is these moonshiners who have brought on the present witless chorus from the streets, these frauds and the gallimaufry of quacks who zoom around college campuses hypothesizing the splendors of the lumpenproletariat while pawing for wallets...
...I have the sus-picion that these interviews always take place in the purlieus of an insane asylum or of a large university...
...During this period we renew our contact with the great thoughts of our time, improve ourselves, and make ourselves better persons through telepathic communication with professors, students, and other suffering persons...
...Let a gal-lows rise from every center field...
...Other pronouncements evoke guffaws...
...Bosh again...
...A lot of bird-brained college boys are dreaming about their appearances at Carnegie Hall and hunkering away from the gloomy day when they will have to fulfill their palmy fates and become life insurance sales-men...
...There is no record of any president ever having made the kind 0f grandiloquent quips about himself that are now the regular repertoire of Assis- Lant President Henry Kissinger and many of the other White House Bell-aoys...
...For, according to the current wisdom, the coarsest expressions from the lowest slob are beautiful, and who is to say that Aristotle ever did any better...
...Increasing num-ecutive privilege, presidential speeches, bers of politicians have joined the chorus and all the other weapons of political in praise of the System and in appre-warfare haven't fazed it...
...So this urge to be taken seriously has its tragic side...
...Against considerable re-crater and brings back a small sample, sistance, it identified and publicized a lot which he deposits in his neighborhood of intolerable behaviors...
...At this point, the only thing that can be said for sure is that the end is not yet in sight, that the stakes have become very high, and that the final outcome could cut either way, or both ways...
...Of course, it could turn out otherwise...
...His testimony is clean of the least spot of guilt or self<loubt...
...This summer we in- tend to study at the University of California at Berkeley, where we have enrolled in G387: Goats and People, Expanding Civil Liberties...
...If you succeed in this, the Blob may then start acting as if it were dead, or anyway moribund...
...Not at all...
...Capital punishment should be reinstated...
...in motion will eventually grind out the It and its progeny get bigger and bigger...
...On Taking Slobs Seriously apologists see it, this contemporary Dillinger's world view is just as legiti-mate as that of any other citizen...
...The Alternative does not publish during July, August, and September, for it is then that our staff withdraws to libraries and universities...
...Or, more tesirable still, "Wallow around in it and atter any kind of gibberish that crosses t'our mind...
...This sober accept-ance of the ordinary man's limited capacities and ultimate insignificance ~vas not undemocratic or even disre-spectful...
...Obviously, when we send out our next issue in October, this famous intellectual journal should be better than ever or at least no worse...
...well, to shorten a long and increasingly obvious analysis . .. the demand to be taken seriously wafts very much of hubris...
...forward, uncontrolled and perhaps un-controllable...
...The great man had suffered grave indignities...
...But for me the most humorous of all these manifestations of the gab phenomenon are those idiotic newspaper columns wherein some semi-educated reporter queries a random assortment of shoppers about the most prudent course for the president to follow, say, at the next International Monetary To Our Readers As some of you noticed last sum-mer...
...It is useful to all of them collectively because it defines a strategy for regaining control over events by means of a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...For Congress, it threatens the later political consequences of im-peachment, which certainly include, as one possible scenario, intense popular backlash against the Democratic Con-gress, the election of a Republican in 1976, and God only knows what foreign or domestic chaos in the interim...
...And it should be carried out during intermissions at professional athletic events...
...Any charlatan who bellows about the elegant sensibilities of common criminals should be boiled in oil...
...This hunger for deferential nods from )ne's fellows has not always agitated :he American herd...
...Outer Space...
...Indeed it is often portrayed as no different than One of the most furious passions )ulsing through the Republic these days s the passion to he taken seriously...
...a ~i- should be aware of this fact, and let it entist comes up with an ingenious device cheer us up a bit over the coming or method for killing Blobs, and it months as the Ervin committee exhumes works...
...In days of yore a ;lob was a slob...
...Of course, it isn't certain that this rhetorical strategy will work...
...He bad not been accorded the high place in society that he knew to be his natural state...
...A small meteor, or some-Now clearly there is much to be said thing, lands on Earth in a flash of flame for this view...
...And a lot of arrant scoundrels are bashing skulls, pillaging, shooting their fellows, skyjacking, and otherwise making nuisances of themselves, all he- cause they heard some charlatan pro claim that there is a Beethoven, a Bal-zac, or an H. Ross Perot struggling in the bosom of every rascal and every fiend...
...Many are besotted in anomie...
...Then, in the nick Water gate is already a success story...
...Taken together they reveal how astonishingly eager Americans are to deliver idiotic philippics or sonorous homilies on just about anything...
...Each day brings efforts, the Washington Post has already news of yet another person or insti-received an apology from the White tution being consumed...
...Then too there are those ridiculous radio pro- grams which encourage the country's fervent yahoos to call in and set things straight...
...Government becomes grim business, un- sympathetic with civil liberties or disagreement...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...And on these occurrences do we ever hear the culprit admit, "I did it because I am an evil, vicious miscreant, warped from birth and so marked as evil until death...
...and IA36: The Comic Book --Relevant to Shakespeare...
...President Coolidge imagined no ~impani when he rolled out of bed in Lhe morning --or in the early afternoon as was more often the case...
...We of time, one of two things happens...
...I can see little good in it, because it elevates the vulgar and drives out the civilized...
...and so to dust...
...it has con-laboratory...
...No one took the sainted chap seriously...
...In practical terms, this would mean that popular passions over Watergate would cool off, and that Congress and the courts wouldn't feel so constrained at each point to go yet one extra mile to punish yet one more person involved, directly or indirectly, actually or allegedly, in the entire repulsive mess...
...And if the Greeks knew nothing else, they knew their sins...
...He lost five hundred dollars at a rigged pin-ball arcade...
...or the Blobs suddenly die by and reconstructs the whole sordid mess...
...As his that of the businessman or any man of achievement...
...Bootblacks ministered ~o the hooves of their clients and did not ileliver themselves of bursts of sidewalk Metaphysics...
...A scientist, or somebody has by no means completely failed us in (often a Teenager), goes to inspect the this case...
...And it was held unimaginable that a newspaper editor would ever query the slob on the ~treet about anything at all, much less Iake him seriously...
...Today they are sodden in affluence...
...This latter is a particularly live possibility...
...See the coupon on page 18...
...Even the ant-like crea-:ures crawling through the ruins of New York City seem to think that they are )ersonages to be accorded the utmost ~eriousness, though they dwell compla-.~ently in an environment that would discommode Cro-Magnon Man, and they display no interest whatsoever in im-)roving their plight and accepting the "udiments of civilization...
...Americans have always been given to overdoing things...
...cerned about may well be his own...
...Well, all these scoundrels should be gathered up with their apologists and put to the sword...
...I devour them...
...C999: The Choreography of Sunshine...
...The Blob goes The Alternative June-September 1973 good in it, because it rests on an untrue proposition --the average man's view of complex problems is generally be-nighted, and rarely useful to any analy- sis...
...Fhe Alternative June-September 1973 Conference...
...Sales girls chattered about lheir sore feet, not the vulgarized politi- cal philosophy you are apt to hear from Iheir modern equivalents...
...The more irrational and bloodthirsty his act, the more he is glorified...
...All this is unquestionably to the prove powerless to stop them...
...Nobody knows who will be next, or what it will all finally lead to...
...The movie ends, the lights go up, serve an appropriate modicum of self-re- and everyone leaves the theater spect...
...No doubt it has issued in a good deal of criminality and sorrow...
...But it has already become clear that there is grave danger to all concerned...
...Let the half time at the next Super Bowl feature the Manson Family, Sirhan Sir- ban, James Earl Ray, and H. Rap Brown...
...For Certainly there are some who have the Watergate story is nowhere near its begun to insist that it is...
...He was willing to admit 1is sorry insignificance, quietly trudge :hrough his simple daily tasks, and when ~is hour was at hand he would croak...
...For instance, there are television shows in which famous faces sit around and jabber about anything that crowds into their tiny minds...
...The ensuing explications always tickle me and fuel my belief that man's closest relatives are not the pri-mates but the hyenas...
...Or perhaps the Blob will prefer to listen to those in the press and elsewhere who are imploring it to roll on and on until every sinner in the land has been brought before the bar of justice and sent to his eternal reward...
...by morning it has be-almost certainly convict many more in come a huge, seething, repulsive Blob the future...
...And only the most gullible college professor would ever have given it a hearing were it not for years of beguiling chatter from psychiatrists, sociologists, and other such charlatans who dance for nickles and dimes before weekly meetings of dozing Rotarians and Kiwanians and the like...
...the tale" he is conIs this also the lesson of Watergate...
...This was as it should have been...
...Civil-good...
...and there is reason to hope that sets out across the landscape, gob- that the huge investigative, judicial, and bling everything in sight and multiplying legislative machinery that has been set faster than a third-generation computer...
...This is a situation which has made De- mocrats and Republicans, President and congressmen, join together in singing the praises of the System...
...Then comes the villain's revised testimony...
...Use the coupon on page 2. Better yet, why not renew your subscription now...
...Still, for those (continued on page 25...
...The President end...
...reassured that, as God is in Heaven, so Yet there is an old proverb- or if is there a System on Earth, which, with there isn't, there ought to be --that the help of a few courageous individuals, warns: Beware the man who draws the will triumph over any dangers or evils moral of the story before the tale has visited upon it from an alien world...
...appropriate results with minimum they invade the cities, wreaking de-damage to innocent persons and insti-struction and death...
...Free me and I'll do it again...
...All sorts of people, it seems, are just sitting around aching to be asked their views on this or that major subject...
...If I may be pardoned the metaphor, said as much in his May 1 speech, which the Blob at this point has only just burst praised the press, the courts, a cour-out of the laboratory and begun to ageous judge," and the Congress...
...Some of the things they say are merely em-barrassing...
...They do so be-cause this rhetoric, in addition to being partially true, is also extremely useful-useful to all of them collec-tively, and useful as well to each group separately...
...This craving for ~dividual recognition and solemn appre- ciation emboldens America's most un-.ikely gnomes...
...Others are bored...
...tanks and rockets tutions...
...Rather it merely recognized lhe resilient truth that a slob is a slob, possessed of no prowess or significance beyond his United States citizenship, the rights and privileges of the Constitution, and the love of his mother...
...Hardly a week goes by that we do not hear of some crazed scoundrel shooting down a batch of defenseless citizens, or making off with valuable property, or commandeering public facilities, or shooting a political candidate...
...Rise up from the muck, and express ~'our creativity," they exhort...
...During the night the sample victed several persons of crimes...
...For its ravage the landscape...
...Now the serious problem with a nation whose citizens take themselves so seri-ously is not the episodic tragedies brought on by serf-righteous scoundrels nor the degradation of rhetoric and the elevation of the thoughts of flatulent yahoos...
...The Blob may not listen, or may not believe what the System-praisers are saying...
...For the President, the Blob threatens im- peachment...
...And glamor pus Franklin probably had less grandiose visions of himself while dining with ~hurchill and Stalin than our last three )residents have had while brushing their :eeth...
...They all make their livings by telling Americans how awe-somely complicated they are and how their creative talents would quite tran-scend those of the masters if only a few adjustments were made in their environ- ments...
...it will begins to grow...
...We might need bail money...
...I can see little The Public Discourse i i i I ~ " ~ I I I II I IIII ! II II I Toward a Political Science of Watergate Everybody knows that old science ciation of its efficacy in responding to fiction cliche, the Giant Amoeboid from Watergate...
...There is a system, and it and smoke...
...The underlying idea here is that if you talk to the Blob as if it has already been done in by the System, you may thereby persuade it that this has in fact happened...
...S123: 'Sexual Perversion" as a Force for Good...
Vol. 6 • June 1973 • No. 9
